The Conservative Party’s vaunted voter-contact database became the focus of testimony in the second day of Michael Sona’s trial over the 2011 election robocalls in Guelph.

The party’s former director of voter contact, Chris Rougier, gave evidence about reports he generated for Elections Canada investigators detailing who used the Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) during the election.

The calls sent to more than 6,000 Guelph voters on election day came from a list of identified non-Conservative supporters in the CIMS database.

Rougier confirmed that six people who worked on the campaign of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke accessed the database, including Andrew Prescott, who has been given an immunity deal from the Crown in exchange for testimony he is expected to give against Sona on Wednesday.

In mostly short responses, Rougier confirmed the Crown’s assertions that Prescott had exported two files of telephone numbers on April 30, 2011 — two days before the vote — of more than 8,000 telephone numbers for Guelph voters.

But the Crown noted that the vast majority of the numbers exported by Prescott were for voters who had been identified as Conservative Party supporters — not the list of non-supporters that Elections Canada investigators believe were used to make the misleading robocalls sending voters to the wrong polling location.

Under cross examination by Sona’s lawyer, Norm Boxall, Rougier admitted that the detailed logs of CIMS records had a major blind spot — they kept logs of exported phone lists, but they didn’t track who downloaded a type of data called “constituent reports.”

Rougier was unable to say why the system didn’t track these reports but said the apparent flaw in the database system has since been corrected.

That means exactly who exported the non-supporters list used for the calls made by culprit using the pseudonym “Pierre Poutine” is still unknown.

In a statement of facts agreed to by both the Crown and defence, it is acknowledged that only John White, who was responsible for getting voters out to the polls, exported a constituent report during the election campaign.

On Monday, White had testified that he used these kinds of reports for his get-out-the-vote work but couldn’t recall why he downloaded reports late in the campaign or who he gave them to.

Much of the court time on Tuesday was spent on highly technical testimony from Matt Meier, owner of RackNine, the company that was used to send out Guelph calls.

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Meier discussed how his system kept electronic logs showing who accessed the voice-broadcasting service and when.

Meier testified that several months after he was contacted by Elections Canada, he uncovered server logs with Internet Protocol addresses for the clients who accessed his service. Those records show a link between Prescott’s account and the account used to do the Guelph robocall.

Meier said he immediately contacted Elections Canada investigator Allan Mathews with the IP info, but then passed on the data about the IP addresses to Rougier.

Meier also gave testimony about how he was first contacted by someone calling himself Pierre Jones, who set up the account used to make the Guelph calls.

Meier said Jones told him he had been referred to RackNine by the Conservative Party.

Meier didn’t recognize Jones’ voice, he told the court.

“It was a male voice,” Meier testified. “It seemed like a young one.”

“He just said the Conservative Party.”

At the time, the company took on new clients only by word of mouth and didn’t even advertise its voice broadcasting service with a website, Meier said.

Soon after the call, Meier sent Jones an email with a user name, password and a link to log onto the company’s service.

During cross-examination, Meier said he first learned his company had been used for the Guelph calls when Mathews showed up at his Edmonton office in November 2011 with a production order.

Soon after, Meier said, he contacted Prescott, the deputy manager of Guelph Conservative campaign, as well as Rougier.

Prescott also had an account with RackNine and Mathews had brought his name up.

“I was curious if he knew anything,” Meier said.

Boxall pressed him on whether Mathews had asked him not to share information on the ongoing investigation. Meier said he couldn’t recall whether he had.

Boxall asked Meier if the voice of the person identifying himself as Jones received months earlier could have been Prescott.

Meier said he couldn’t exclude that possibility, as he hadn’t spoken to Prescott before.

As the investigation continued, accused Meier of contacting Prescott again.

“Isn’t it obvious that you tipped off Mr. Prescott again?”

Meier said he didn’t recall doing so.

On Monday, party worker Matt McBain testified that Rougier’s girlfriend — former party worker Madi Murariu — sent him a file with databases and emails about the Guelph robocall in December 2011, presumably as the party was trying to figure out what happened.

Jones was the one of two aliases behind the robocalls. The second — Pierre Poutine — was used to register the “burner” phone used to set up the call.

In one email to Jones, Meier warned that his system is to be used mainly for political calling and that any private use had to comply with CRTC telemarketing rules.

In another email, he again cautioned that the powerful system had the capacity to “do serious damage if misused.”

Pierre Jones emailed back but sounded more concerned about the delay in processing a PayPal payment he had made to the system to fund the outgoing calls.

Meier described how Jones, identified as RackNine’s “Client 93,” set up an account and called in to the service on the night of May 1, 2011 to record two outgoing audio messages — one the fake Elections Canada call, the other a call pretending to come from Liberal candidate in Guelph that was never sent out.

Sona, the only person charged over the robocalls, denies involvement in the call. There has been no evidence introduced at trial linking him to Pierre Jones account.

Prescott, potentially the most important witness to give testimony against Sona, is due to take the stand Wednesday morning.

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